Young People Flock To Second-Tier Sites Amid Shifting Tastes
This is welcome news, as far as I’m concerned. I just signed up on Facebook and the interface was noticeably less cluttered and usable. I’m not a huge fan of these new-fangled social networking sites, but from a design perspective things are starting to look up. As I pointed out when Ditty Talk rolled out, the MySpace design is just plain ugly and whenever someone adds a photo or video to their page, it gets pushed all out of shape and the user ends up scrolling in all directions.
These new contenders have some neat features that MySpace lacks:
Among the new social-networking sites is one called XuQa.com, run by San Francisco start-up business iVentster Inc., which lets users play games against their online friends and offers awards to the top scorers. Hi5.com, operated by San Francisco company Hi5 Networks Inc., comes with a built-in music player. Piczo, meanwhile, is similar to MySpace and Facebook Inc. in that it lets its mostly teenage users create personal Web pages filled with photos, video and lists of their online friends.
Best of all, they just look a lot better and seem to conform to web standards.
MySpace is just plain ol’ poo. I don’t like it.